There was a span of a week in January where rain fell on the city to the point where pundits declared the drought over. Whether that was the truth-or-not was another story - the culture of our day lends itself to skepticism on all things news related.
Either way as my son and wife scurried towards our car, we wore the remnants of the storm as it clung to our bodies as ripples appeared on the ground with each step.
Rain doesn’t bother me per se but it can be annoying as it taps, taps, taps, incessantly on my head like a woodpecker on a tree.
Enough is enough, I often think. I get it. It’s raining in a land that more often than not revels in the glow of the California sun - which truthfully is just as petulant as the rain.
I’m a London fog or overcast kinda guy. It makes me happy. One, because I can dress in layers and two layers again - it’s all vanity, really. Malibu mornings is the sine qua non I long for.
On one such glorious overcast day as the rain stopped, I layered up, camera in tow loaded with Tri-X, because Bresson and the light was even, and I walked to the Hammer.
It was the final days of the Joan Didion exhibit and though I had known of her, we were strangers in the night. But as the shutter clicked, I was destined to slouch towards her writings.
In the vein of Hemingway, clear and precise, with selection of word usage and structure, Didion became the conduit to a Los Angeles I have grown nostalgic for over the years - a muse of the written word, and a voice of the things we go through in life and how we deal with them as we age - a truth I am seeking as I am planted in the soils of middle age.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, she writes, “Time is the school in which we learn.” I believe I was only prepared to read her works in the time I was set to - not too early and not too late.
On an overcast day in Los Angeles with my camera in tow, in a season of life that we all succumb to, Joan Didion arrived right on time.
